


ignore the curse on the door

by buckstiel



Category: Campaign (Podcast), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Leenik is Bad at Feelings, M/M, Roche - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 14:47:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15221513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: After Venton and Chartreuse, Leenik doesn't know what to do with love.Imperiled on Roche after the arrival of Inquisitor Sahdett, he might have to learn.





	ignore the curse on the door

**Author's Note:**

> title adapted from "beauty to the beast" by theodora goss
> 
> pounding this entire thing out in one sitting in the midst of a writing block is a testament to how much i love leenik geelo
> 
> spoilers/kanan through episode 98

Leenik Geelo was tethered at the end of a string.

It wasn’t even a particularly good string with its fraying bits hanging loose, leaving the situation all the more precarious for the rest. And as much as he wanted to blame it all on BHIKKE, the incident with Chartreuse, Agent Zero lopping off his hand--the list went on, narrowing to a Venton-shaped point--he couldn’t. 

The string had always been there. Soon, it likely wouldn’t be. What laid beyond was a mystery.

The others’ concern was palpable. The last Life Day, once Tamlin had tired himself out into a snoozing heap in Lyn’s hammock, Tryst cornered him by the cockpit. His kimono slouched off one shoulder, a couple stray flecks of glitter clinging desperately to the line of his collarbone--Leenik looked there so he wouldn’t have meet Tryst’s eye. 

“Everything all right with you?”

“Uh, yeah--I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be fine?” he said quickly. “Do I not seem fine?” 

Tryst didn’t answer; or, he didn’t answer immediately. “If something’s up--” 

“ _Nothing’s_ up!” 

“--you can talk to us, okay? We’re your…”

At that, Tryst shrugged, cast a glance back toward the kitchen where Bacta was fighting with something steaming on the stove as Tony wound a maze around his feet, Lyn ignoring the whole scene with her head buried in a datapad. A rush of something welled up in Leenik, rushing from his belly to the back of his throat--far too suddenly, so he swallowed it back down before he had time to name it.

“I don’t know.” Tryst shrugged again, and the kimono slipped further down his arm. “We’re not technically family, but we’re as good as a lot of us got, right?” 

He thought of Venton, and for the first time since that night at BHIKKE, his head felt bare. 

“I guess.” He let his eyes drift back to Tryst’s collarbone and the tiny spritz of light as he moved under the ship’s harsh bulbs, staying wordless long enough for Tryst to laugh off the unsettled energy eddying around them and crack a joke awful enough to pull Lyn from her reading.

 _Family_ was a loaded term, and he hadn’t been able to shake the feeling of his finger on the trigger. So he wouldn’t call the crew of the Mynock _family_. He couldn’t. Maybe that was what love was, but all the roiling and raucous tightness in his head and heart never slowed down enough for him to transcribe what they were saying, and the records of love in Neemo’s novels never looked quite like this. 

Leenik wasn’t dense--he knew _love_ was a word with a wide wingspan, that the _love_ in _Love Under the Suns_ covered everything from the focal romance to the strength of the cast’s collective friendship. That love was nothing close to a mirror. He wanted it, imagined it, plotted an epic saga of daydreams where the scenes of their lives played out on familiar beats and the catharsis was safe and longstanding. But between himself and the daydream was a gulf he couldn’t begin to know how to cross.

So he read. He read more and covered his ears when a few more strands of his thread popped and turned his conscience off when his shock gloves locked into place. He threw the books with sad endings in the safe because weren’t there enough of those to go around in the galaxy already? If he wanted death, if he wanted separation and pain, he could turn himself loose to his own incorrigible nightmares.

Maybe it was working, maybe not. Bacta tried to broach the subject after leaving Phindar, but he never got far--the debriefing protocols were good at that, burying the bits and pieces that needed burying beneath the labyrinth of rules and Lyn’s flustered annoyance. In that moment, he was ready to declare it working. 

Roche was another matter altogether. 

Inquisitor Sahdett arrived just after Bacta stepped away to take a mysterious call on his comms, and by the time Sahdett found them, Bacta was close to hysterical. The next hour didn’t commit itself to Leenik’s memory--one moment, he was charging his shock gloves as Sahdett drew their lightsaber, and the next he and Tryst were gasping for breath in a dank corner of the tunnels, surrounded by scorched stormtrooper armor and stray spindley Verpine limbs. 

“How’d we get here--” 

“Are you--are you kidding me?” Tryst hissed. “You cut a path through a bunch of drones and stormtroopers getting us away from Sahdett! We had an entire _conversation_ about the first thing we’d do on this beach vacation everyone keeps talking about while! You! Did! That!”

Leenik glanced down at himself and then to Tryst, giving him a once-over. The goopy stains he could only assume were Verpine blood, and some of Tryst’s own was leaking from his nose and a nasty cut at his hairline. 

“Should I know where your blaster is too?” 

Groaning into his hands, Tryst leaned against the wall and slid to the floor, ignoring the squelching sounds of the native fungi. “I have no blaster--Sahdett saw to that. Your shock gloves are busted… they’re back somewhere in the mess hall, I think.” 

The list of trouble ran long: most of the weapons were back at the ship, where Lyn had barricaded the rest of them, leaving them with-- 

“So. Just my new hand, huh?” He waited for Tryst to come back at him with something--not necessarily a sarcastic barb, but it would have taken the thick tension in the air down to a breathable level. It would have let the terrible wheels spinning at the back of Leenik’s head slow down before they careened off the tracks. 

Down the tunnel and into the dark echoed Verpine screeches and the deep vibrations of a lightsaber. 

“Told Lyn we weren’t gonna win this thing, remember?” Tryst finally said. 

Before Leenik could register what he was doing, he found himself sitting on the ground beside him. There wasn’t anything he could say to that--he’d been on Tryst’s side in that debate after all--and those wheels in his head were whirling so fast they were starting to smoke, the clouds billowing up into his vision. They were going to die. The crew of the Mynock was going to die. Their bodies were going to be as lifeless and broken as Venton and Chartreuse’s, and Tryst had called them all _family_.

“I’m sorry." 

“Wh--are you apologizing? Why are you apologizing?” Tryst grabbed him at the shoulder and made him look at him. “It’s not like you called Sahdett.”

“But I didn’t stop him!” 

“Oh, what, and that’s just as bad as actively bringing him here?” 

“You don’t _get it_ , Tryst!” 

Leenik jumped to his feet--two more stormtroopers rounded the corner and his cyborg hand cracked their necks beyond usefulness in a matter of seconds. The pieces of their armor clacked against each other as they crumpled. More dead by his doing, and another feeling rolled into his gut that he couldn’t identify. Apathy, maybe, but he’d suspected he was starting to enjoy it. 

“Then kriffing help me get it!” Tryst pointed to the bodies littered in the tunnel, finally landing on the ones he just felled. “What’s been going on with you?” 

(There was a moment when he was young--not a child, but barely so--just after Venton had gotten his bounty hunting license. He was getting ready to leave Rodia to take on his first official job, and he’d cooked meatloaf for the two of them as a quiet apology for the stretch of time Leenik would have to spend alone. The seasoning was just right. Venton let him have a glass of local spice liquor to toast to the day they’d be bounty hunting together, just the two of them, even though he’d meet Chartreuse on this job. It’s that moment, their two glasses raised high in the air, that Leenik returned to when Venton fell in Tibannopolis, that he felt surging back now.) 

Tryst was still waiting for an answer and the words crowded at the back of Leenik’s teeth-- _you said you were family, and you didn’t know my family always dies_. He couldn’t say it, not to Tryst. Saying it to Tryst meant saying more, more that he had yet to fully understand, and the distant sound of Sahdett’s lightsaber reminded him that he was already scared. 

Slowly, avoiding the litter of bodies around them, Tryst stood, picked at the dried blood that dribbled down his top lip. That feeling was back, the one that rose through the whole of him, up to his mouth where he’d have no choice but to let it spill out into the open. It burned at a different frequency than before, set his hands unstable and shaking; and while the thought of losing the Mynock crew blew a hole in him the size of Venton, the thought of just Tryst-- 

“It’s such a long story,” Leenik said, quiet. “I’m not sure it’s something you want to hear.” 

“I say things people don’t want to hear all the time. How bad can it be?” 

“Not like that.”

“I--c’mon, I was trying to help.” 

“I know, okay?” 

He could explain later, if they ever managed to fly away from this stars-forsaken system, but that wasn’t something he wanted to count on. The blasterfire was drawing closer and their comms had been nothing but static since he pulled out of the blackout, and maybe he did want to put a name to what had been flipping his stomach upside down. 

With a few long steps, Leenik closed the distance between them. His heart was pounding harder than anything he’d ever felt reaching out of his insides. “It’s really fine,” he said, pulling Tryst into a clumsy kiss. 

With a brief, bright peak of panic, Leenik realized he didn’t know what to do--he’d never actually been the one to initiate, and maybe there was something he was missing; but that line of thought fizzed out as Tryst flung his arms around Leenik’s neck, pulling him closer and making the most _obscene_ sounds into his mouth. As much as Leenik had thought he’d heard it all, he apparently hadn’t even been close. 

“Wait,” Tryst said breathlessly, pulling back for a moment. “Really?” 

“I…” Part of Leenik wanted to admonish him, throw out a _where have you been the past two weeks,_ but the rest of him focused on Tryst’s kiss-swollen lips, the flush that threatened to take over his entire face, and the scene from the climax of _Rose of Coruscant_ that played out exactly like this. “Shut up.” 

He kissed him again, letting his hands tangle in his long blond hair, reveling in how Tryst’s fingers lingered over the points of his ears. Maybe this was love. Maybe this time, no one Leenik pledged his heart to had to die.

Around the corner, the sound of Sahdett’s lightsaber grew closer, and Leenik pulled his cyborg hand from Tryst’s hair long enough to power it up, get the sparks flowing.

“Kriff, that’s hot,” Tryst gasped.

“You haven’t seen anything yet.”


End file.
